Robotic process automation is the process of automating various tasks by deploying robots that emulate human action. RPA or robotic process automation tools help you build and deploy these robots so that you can streamline various business processes and reduce the dependency on knowledge workers for repetitive tasks.
Use cases of robotic process automation
The market for RPA has grown almost 10 fold in the five years between 2016 and 2021. SMBs are counting upon RPA to scale up their businesses. The increased demand has also brought down the cost of automation and made it more accessible for small and midsize businesses. By 2020 78% of organizations responding to a survey had already implemented RPA to some degree. Here are some popular use cases of Robotic process automation.
- Customer Service
- Invoice Processing
- Productivity Enhancement
- Employee Onboarding
- Payroll
Let’s go through an example of customer service RPA to understand how it actually helps a business.
Let’s say company A receives 70 service requests from customers per day on an average. If the average time of interpreting a request, categorizing it, and solving the problem is 20 minutes, 70 requests would take 1400 minutes of human engagement. Now, this should not be an issue for a large company with plenty of resources, but company A being a small business struggles to support their customers while also handling other tasks or processing new customers.
Enter customer service robotic process automation. You train a bot to categorize all 70 of the requests. Some of those requests might require human intervention, the rest can be fulfilled by a robotic workflow.
Depending on the category of the request, the RPA triggers a series of automated actions including conversing with the customer about the progress of the task.
Company A saves hundreds of human hours per month and establishes a more efficient customer service workflow which in turn helps them retain more customers.
Robotic process automation is an expansive industry and its use cases are constantly breaching the boundaries of IT and SaaS.
Robotic process automation tools you can benefit from in 2023
In this section, we will go through five robotic process automation tools, talk about their key features, and how they can benefit your business.
BotPath
BotPath is a comprehensive RPA solution for businesses that comes with a visual builder, bot builder, workflow automation, and data management features.
The visual builder allows you to add automation to applications. The bot builder feature helps you easily automate workflows to a certain degree of complexity. The tool helps you bring all the important business processes to the same place and gain more control over them.
BotPath also helps you with securing and managing data collected through various processes and in different formats.
UiPath
UiPath is a robotic process automation tool that focuses on quick and effective digitization of business processes. It comes with a drag and drop interface which allows you to place automated workflows with minimal or no knowledge of the underlying processes.
UiPath can help you with tasks like data entry, data scraping, email marketing, and other repetitive accumulative tasks.
Simplicity is prioritised in UiPath, it’s a tool that helps you hit the ground running with RPA.
Blue Prism
Blue Prism offers an Intelligent Automation Platform that serves a myriad of purposes from identifying the processes that can be automated, to setting up automations, to training autonomous bots to analyze data and enhance processes.
Blue Prism helps you create an AI-driven customer experience while also providing ways for your existing employees to augment their capabilities with AI. You can use Blue Prism to free up knowledge workers from mundane tasks and focus their hours on profit building exercises.
Automation Anywhere
Automation Anywhere is an automation platform that offers a wide range of capabilities around process automation. You can start with process discovery where the platform analyzes your existing processes and offers recommendations as to improve them.
With the RPA workspace feature you can easily deploy automated workflows to perform repetitive tasks.
The document automation feature helps you turn documents into actionable insights.
You can integrate Automate Anywhere with your application or business site using their interface.
Automation Anywhere comes with a solid foundation in machine learning and natural language processing creating reliable process automation capabilities.
Microsoft Power Automate
It is a RPA solution for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Microsoft Power Automate helps you with repetitive processes like data entry, document processing, email management, etc.
You can deploy this tool with relative ease and it comes with a range of integrations to help you use it for various kinds of processes.
To conclude
The robotic process automation market is maturing and there are plenty of options to choose from for businesses. The key to making the right choice is to understand your own requirements and prioritize one feature over another.
